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Shuttle Atlantis Finally In Orbit
Klaidas writes "After delays, the shuttle Atlantis has finally been launched today as expected. NASA reports: 'The shuttle Atlantis is in orbit, headed for a challenging new phase in the construction of the International Space Station. Commander Brent Jett and his five crewmates will install a new 17-ton segment of the station's truss backbone, adding a new set of giant solar panels and batteries to the complex. Three spacewalks are planned.'"
Look it up!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Solar panels are good and all but if I were them, I'd install the bathrooms, internet connection, and Dance Dance Revolution cuz that would be awesome in space. I just hope someone doesn't appear inside the part they're working on saying that the new part will destroy his universe with exotic particles that don't obey the laws of physics (what? that joke was worth another whirl)
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
It really says something when the "It's scheduled to go up" post appears when it's launching, and the "It's in orbit" post is 12 hours late, after all the comments in the former post say "It's in orbit already. Had your coffee yet?"
I was watching MSNBC's shuttle coverage with 2 minutes left on the clock until launch when Cowboy Neal's "scheduled" post hit the front page. As Richard Hammond of BBC's Top Gear would say, "Oh no this is bad..."
May I propose a "This is going to happen within X hours/in the future" option for the submit on logged-in users, sorta like what Pud does for F*ed Company? That way they can get more priority, those who abuse it get banned from using it, and makes things work better.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
...but isn't 10:36pm a little late for a story called, "Shuttle Atlantis Finally in Orbit"? You'd think it took 12 hours to get up there or something!
We really aren't spending all that much cash on the ISS. The ISS was meant to be finished LONG ago, but politics, things like iraq, and budget cuts all got in the way. They've gotten as much done as they have so far so why not finish the job? When the ISS is finaly obsolete and ready to be junked they'll stop spending any money on it. To continue it's usefullness they must do what? Spend more money (UH DUH!).
And 7% is a fairly good rate for something that we still aren't really good at (why were doing it!). Also it's not like...you know...these people that go up have absolutely no idea what the dangers are. They accept the risks, we learn when the project succeeds or fails, and the human knoledgebase progresses just a little more. Maybe we should just ground all shuttles for the next 100 years while we work on more theories before we send the next shuttle up. Surely it would be safer! You can come up with ideas all day, but they mean shit until you try them out.
Goes to show a low UID really doesn't mean shit when it comes to brains.
Seriously, did anything go wrong? It almost always does. Near misses, falling foam, inspections ... Hate to troll, but everytime I watch a launch now my heart races and I break out in a cold sweat whenever I see a thruster flare or a t.v. screen artifact near the shuttle. NASA tries to project confidence, but don't we/they really want a next gen orbiter without all the worries?
I'm going to step back and argue from the opposing side of this issue (from my opinin, as I support the ISS).
What is the purpose of the ISS?
1. No major scientific gains have come from this project except from the few things we have learned about biology in space (while here I aside that this alone is valuable information and will be useful over the next few decades).
2. There is no economic value of such a object at current time (aside: I agree, but see my last aside; science doesn't always have immediate economic uses: anyone think Gregor Mendel would have thought he was pioneering a multi-billion dollar industry with those peas?).
1960's: We sent people to the moon
1970's: We put a space station into low earth orbit
1980's: We had frequent flights to LEO with a reusable craft.
1990's: We had occasional flights to LEO with a reusable craft.
2000's: We managed to get people into orbit with a craft that might get used two more times before the end of its life.
The main difference is that they need to use the same astronauts over and over again because they are highly trained, and they either have a safe mission or a deadly catastrophe. Soldiers on the other hand are easily replaced (it's not like there are only 10 people in the world to do the job) and way more likely to get non-lethally injured. It is stupid to make the comparison looking at a sample of a couple hundred astronauts to millions of soldiers. If you want ridiculous comparisons, 8 Presidents out of 43 have died in office, that is a nearly 20% chance you will die if you become President, now who would be stupid enough to want to take that risk?
For those who hates streaming video and want to see the launch, here is a 14 MB MP4 file that can be downloaded.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Great, They get it in orbit just before the ZPM gets completely drained
Good luck and Godspeed to the crew on their current mission. Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
Easy, chief. Don't hurt your flag-waving hand too much.
Please help metamoderate.
Well, if there was a "-1 Persecution Complex", I'm sure you'd get that instead.
They had to stop in the ionosphere off of exit 50 on Space Highway 7 to go to a Bob Evans because Joseph Tanner forgot to pee and were getting kind of hungry. And you know how the ionosphere Bob Evans is, it takes FOREVER to get going again.
Monstar L
Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
As a job, being an astronaut today is not that great. The guys who go up on the ISS are being worked really hard for their whole tour, because it's now so hard to get people up there. The workload has increased substantially since the number of flights declined. There's a good chance the tour of duty in space may be longer than expected, due to problems on the ground. (The Soviet-era cosmonauts had it even worse; one guy was up on Mir for 438 days, being unfortunate enough to be up during the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
But that's not the worst part. NASA has too many people for the flight slots, so many of the "astronauts" will never fly. Right now, there are 100 flight-eligible astronauts, most of whom are doing mid-level management jobs. (NASA's phrase is "will serve in technical assignments until assigned to a space flight.") Or worse, filling the daily "lunch with an astronaut" slot. NASA is no longer training new astronauts.
Being an astronaut doesn't make you famous any more. Here's the list of active astronauts. How many have you heard of?
In general, ISS's lifespan is more dependent on funds to maintain it than on the actual lifespan of its parts. We're looking at reboost costs, crew and supply delivery/waste removal costs, etc . Some parts will wear out, but in general, ISS is not expected to structurally fail until we let it reenter the atmosphere. I believe it is expected to be 1.3B$/yr, and we've only budgetted $13B (ten years). Many of the modules have lifespans of 30+ years, and as we see on (still operating) Spirit and Opportunity (and many other probes), the real, physical lifespan may well be much longer.
I really hope we don't do the whole Skylab thing again. "Okay, we've burned a ton of money and fixed all of the glitches. Lets let it burn up now!"
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
I wouldn't call it more pointless than the war in Iraq. That's pretty damn pointless. But clearly - the value in the space station, and probably the space program in general isn't from it's direct research value, but from the spinoff from it. Here's what I think the indirect benefits are:
1) Pumping large amounts of money into defense contractors - particularly important for those contractors during peacetime. FWIW - I say take the 100's of billions of dollars we're pumping into Iraq, and divert it to NASA. Then you'd see one heck of a manned space program.
2) All of the spinoff technology that come from doing such innovative things. Need I mention integrated circuits, advances in lightweight composites, Tang or the Nintendo Powerglove? Come on, where would we be without our Tang?
3) National pride. Critics will argue the ephemerality of this one, but I would argue that it has real measurable effect. National pride is a factor in both the perception of America in the eyes of the rest of the world and maybe even our own perception of ourselves. Both of these are ultimately, in my eyes, good for America doing business in a world economy.
4) Finally, the longest range effect (but maybe most important) is the increase in students pursuing science and engineering education. In fact, it probably translates to great numbers of students pursuing higher education in general. And this, I would argue, has the potential to be the biggest and most lasting effect for our economy.
Anyway - just IMHO.
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Why aren't they investing our tax dollars into an endowment and let congress just spend the interest? That would make a lot more sense than just borrow, borrow, borrow.
IANA accountant, but...
The current US government budget is $2.77 trillion USD. Assuming an annual return rate estimate of 15%, we would need about $18.46 trillion USD in an endowment just to keep the same. To account for an annual inflation rate of about 3.2% and to allow for a real annual growth of 4% (to account for possible bad years, rainy day funds, etc) we need to adjust our figures. Now, we need an endowment size of $35.51 trillion USD.
The latest M3 numbers (broadest level of measuring circulating currency) for the US dollar were estimated at $10.34 trillion USD. Even if we cleared our National Debt (somehow) of just under $9 trillion USD and returned that currency to circulation, we'd still be short by over $16 trillion USD. The GDP of the US is around $11.6 trillion USD. Sorry, we just don't have enough money to do it. Even doing something unthinkable like reducing the budget to 25% of its size now wouldn't work. We'd need around $8.8 trillion USD, and the damage done by taking that much out of circulation and the quick reduction in government size (thus increasing unemployment) would be devastating to our economy.
Governments use debt to control the currency from inflating out of control by issing treasury bonds and such, thus taking money out of circulation and cooling the economy. Amounts of money in those sizes are completely different than you or I getting a home mortgage or buying a car, and they have different effects. Check up on it here. I do agree that the national debt is out of control and needs to be drastically reduced, but I don't think we'll get out of it in time. The time will soon come to pay the piper, perhaps in a decade, and I fear the result will be an as yet unmatched global recession.
I hope I'm wrong.
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Sure, you mentioned the foam, but I bet you didn't find a way to blame SCO and/or Microsoft... MOD PARENT DOWN! :)
"WTF is up with "rebuilding iraq"? Why do we want to rebuild it for? We should just smash it up real good and then leave so that the arabs know not to fuck with us."
/.? Who can say now that the Bush administration doesn't try to be open and forthcoming with the American people?
/snark
Donald Rumsfeld? Posting on
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
It's unfortunate that you were modded as a troll, because I think you bring up some good points.
The parent argued that astronauts were "reused" because of the amount of training they received. You replied:
How many PhDs does one have to have in order to push a button (which is essentially all they do)?
A decent sized chunk of astronauts do not have PhDs. Having a PhD is simply used as a measure of what an astronaut candidate has already accomplished and their ability to learn. Most astronauts don't really even use their PhD.
They do go through 2 years of training by NASA after they are selected in things like space systems, EVA, flight training, etc. They also typically do a few years of work in jobs which could be generally considered engineering support (such as working rendezvous procedures, or whatever) before they are flown. By the time an astronaut flies, there is several million dollars with of training invested in them - that's the point the parent was attempting to make. This isn't unique to NASA...the level of investment is similar to that a, say, Air Force Colonel has.
I wouldn't quite classify astronauts as technicians, but they aren't some sort of God either. The best description is either "Reseach Pilot/Engineer" (for the Pilot types) or "Systems Engineer" (for the Mission Specialists). There job is a lot more than button pushing, they are deeply involved in the development of procedures, techniques, and space equipment.
Worst...sig...ever!
Is optimum physical fitness required for working in weightless space?
Why yes, it is.
1) On ascent, you face the launch G-forces.
2) In space, your body starts breaking down. If you're weak when you go up, and you stay for a long time, you might well be wheelchair or even bed-bound when you return.
3) To minimize this effect as much as possible, astronauts spend long periods of time in space every day exercising. ISS astronauts burn about 3,000 calories per day every day, despite being in a zero-G environment.
4) After descent, you need to be back to normal shape as soon as possible.
The average astronaut who spends a few months on the ISS loses 5-10% of their body weight in the process.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."